24 Pull Requests: The journalism edition

Over 10,000 people around the world are currently taking part in an annual event called 24 Pull Requests.

24 Pull Requests, which is held each December, asks developers, designers, content creators, and others to give thanks for open source software by “giving back little gifts of code for Christmas.” The idea is simple: over the first 24 days of December, participants are asked to improve code quality and documentation, fix issues and bugs or add missing features to existing projects.

I looked at the list of suggested projects for people to work on and didn’t see any journalism projects listed (though I did see that journalists from the Financial Times have signed up to contribute to other projects.)

It would be worthwhile for journalism organizations to specifically point out ways that people can contribute meaningfully through open source submissions. It’s a way to deepen connections with existing audiences, build connections with new audiences and ask for help more broadly than content submissions. (I recommend that you tag GitHub issues that are appropriate for outside contributors with a “help wanted” tag or a “good for new contributors” tag so that they can be easily surfaced.)

To help out participants in this year’s 24 Pull Requests, I decided to make a list of some of the most interesting open source journalism-related projects from 2015 that they can learn from, improve, use and/or contribute to. I’ll admit: I’ve made the list, but haven’t checked it twice. If there are other projects that fit the bill, please add them in the comments. (And if one of your resolutions is to learn more about this kind of stuff, you can start with my guide to learning more about GitHub and open source projects.)
…

Melody has a great list of projects and places where you can find journalism projects.

Useful for finding places to contribute as well as finding communities building new tools.

Will try to give you the full 24 days next year to contribute! (Nothing prevents you from contributing at other times of the year as well.)

Enjoy!

PS: Reaching out to unknown others involves risk. But the rewards, community, contribution to a common cause, broadening your view of the world, are orders of magnitude greater than the risk. Take a chance, reach out to a new project this year.

This entry was posted
on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2015 at 11:43 am and is filed under Journalism, News, Reporting.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.